Afghanistan: the war NATO cannot win

It is not every day that a senior military commander of the British Army quotes Leon Trotsky, leader of the Red Army during the Russian Revolution. But in May this year, speaking of Britain’s role in Afghanistan, General Sir Richard Dannatt – the outgoing chief of general staff – re-cycled Trotsky's warning that "you may not be interested in this war, but this war is interested in you".

Dannatt was justifying Britain’s war against the Taliban as the front line in  the war to protect British citizens from international terror.

But Trotsky’s aphorism could just as easily be taken as a symbol of the way the Afghan war has crept stealthily into the foreground of the people’s consciousness in this country during the last year.

In the first five years following the British and US invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001, as part of the post 9/11 war on terror, a mere five British soldiers were killed in combat.

Then in 2006, as British forces were directed to Helmand province in the south to take it back from Taliban control, it all went pear-shaped. By mid-September this year 214 British soldiers had died at the hands of the Taliban, an enemy difficult to pin down, quick to retreat, confident in their supply lines and in the willingness of the local people to tolerate or back their campaign.

This summer the media went into compliant overdrive to drum up support for “our boys” against a backcloth of flag-drapped coffins arriving home. The Tory-dominated media tried to turn growing hostility to the war into a campaign against Labour for not supplying the troops with enough high quality equipment. But millions of people continue to ask the question; what is it all for? Time and again the clear majority of people polled do not want more troops to join those already there. And this growing disillusion is not confined to Britain but is reflected in the US and all other NATO countries with forces in Afghanistan.

The government, under pressure, has constantly tried to link this war to the “fight against terrorism at home”. In an article in August, Labour’s Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth said once again: “We are fighting there to protect our national security. We are confronting the Taliban-led insurgency to prevent terrorists returning to that country.”

But, as many have pointed out, the idea that al-Qaeda needs a "secure base" from which to launch terrorist attacks is ludicrous. First, the Taliban were always uneasy hosts of Bin Laden’s forces in their country, and not part of its messianic ambitions to bring Islamic rule to the western world. They have always been more concerned with kicking foreigners out of their country. And since 2001, al-Qaeda does not issue orders from some hideaway to its operatives. It is a highly decentralised, largely self-sustaining movement dispersed across the world.

One of the reasons it is self-sustaining is that it can rely upon a steady flow of recruits because young Muslims around the world are appalled and angry by the killings of civilians carried out by British and US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of delivering “security”. The UN reported last February that 2008 saw a record number of Afghan civilians killed, more than 1200; 881 of them officially blown apart by coalition air strikes – most recently villagers collecting fuel for the winter from hijacked oil tankers.

It is the occupation and war that is causing the threat to British security and spawning terrorism, not the other way around.

Unconvinced by their own official reasons, the government has piled up layer upon layer of other reasons as to why Britain is fighting the Taliban. One day it is “to lift the war-torn country out of poverty”. The next day it is “to fight the growth of the world opium trade” based in Helmand.  Later it appears to be to save women from oppression and get young girls into school. Occasionally it is a fight that “NATO can’t afford to lose”, meaning the most powerful imperialist military alliance in the world cannot be seen to fail. Most recently, the excuse was to ensure voting in the 20 August elections, was “free from intimidation and fear”.

The fact that as few as 2000 of 80,000 eligible people voted in areas of the Helmand apparently under safe British control says it all – both about the ineffectiveness of Britain’s military strategy and the failure of its political goal of winning over the bulk of the Afghan people away from the Taliban’s influence, control or intimidation.

The fact that NATO is left propping up a deeply corrupt, hated and hemmed in Karzai government in a war it cannot win, is becoming more widely accepted among military leaders. They are now thrashing about trying to find a new strategy, hoping to buy off some of the Taliban through giving them regional power and training a huge Afghan army to do some of the fighting.

The Taliban are deeply reactionary forces who have already once ruled the country with an Islamic dictatorship that brutally oppressed women and destroyed human rights. The disgrace is that the 2001 invasion and ongoing war has boosted them again. This will not change until the US and NATO forces get out of the country and let the Afghan people decide their own fate.

Join the demonstration to demand British and NATO troops get out of Afghanistan, London 24 October.

Tue 22, September 2009 @ 11:19